Posts filed under 'Travel'
The business trip to Japan is coming up, shoot, that is tomorrow! I haven’t spent time preparing for the trip yet!!
I’ll go alone this time because Jane is so worried about Owen taking long haul flight -15 hours of plane time 
it is not too exciting travel alone, but she promised that she will go watching Olympics with me next year, we will see.
Planned stop is Tokyo, Nagoya, Koyto, Osaka, Hikkado. Heard many rumors saying Hikkado is so popular in summer and I’d have to book 3-4 month in advance, so I must go find out now.
Stay tuned for the trip report when I am traveling, one thing for sure, there will be lots of photos.
Here I come, Japanese food!
July 4th, 2007
Merry Christmas, dear readers to tigeryao.com! 2006 is a great year to remember to each of you, here we want to share with you something special that happened to us, enjoy reading and hope you can share with us the news about you.
- First and also the most importanly, we are lucky enough to be the first two among 5 billion people in the world to see a little guy named Owen Yao.
- Jane celebrated her first birthday for not being a twenty something, Jane viewed this birthday very special just because now we have three people to celebrate.
- Sherwood got his first time cruise experience on a beautiful Norweigien Cruise ship - Jewel - to East Carribbean, include San Juan Purto Rico, Antigua, US Virgin Island, Bahama etc. Interestingly this is also his first time experience to travel (leisure) without Jane for the first time - amazingly, Sherwood survived himself by bring his parents, and brought home some very dark skin which made Jane had difficulties to recognize Sherwood.
- 2006 is the first year that Jane and Sherwood didn’t travel to overseas, but we did manage to travel pregnantly (hope this is a word, screw the grammer) to some USA places include Portsmouth, NH, Cape cod, MA, Newport, NH etc. The most memorable thing was a half day whale watching boat tour.
- We watched about 52 movies together this year, that is more than 60% drop Year over Year, but this still beats main street’s estimate for a first year parents. The 10 best in our humble opinion include “The Departed”, ”Cars”, “Da Vinci code”, “Over the hedge”, “Click”, “Eight Below”, “World Trade Center”, “Pursuit of Happiness”, “Borat”, “Thank you for smoking”.
Stay tuned and look for the update for part 2.
December 25th, 2006
My last blog was almost a month ago, I was on the road for more than three weeks! it was just too tiring to sit in front of computer at the end of each exciting day. The most exciting part that I have to share with you is my first cruise experience, as you read in my prevoius blog, to east carribbean via NCL Jewel.
Overall the “Freestyle” is by no means just a brand of NCL, there is indeed a lot of freedom on the ship, and even with my parents who are in their 60’s, we all have a lot of fun on the ship. Being a first timer, there are for sure a lot of bummers, such as things forget to bring with you, so let me summarize what I have learned and hope that is useful to you, especially to those who will take NCL ships.
Things to do before boarding:
- Make internet searches and book excursion trips by yourself, it usually save $10-25/pp for each excursion trip. Internet on the ship is available but it is expensive. Once you have made reservation, suggest you write down the contact info and where to meet near your cruise ship. Notice sometimes booking excursion trips may give you early disembark advantage. Plan to return to the ship at least 1 hour before the embarkation time, so that you can accommodate unplanned events such as traffic jams if you use a rental car.
- Board early: usually boarding started around 1pm, so get there early to beat the crowd.
Things to do immediately after boarding:
- Reserve special restaurant for dinner first: notice there are three restaurants charges cover charges (Chin-chin:$10, Le Bistro: $10, Cagney:$15), but first day has ½ price on the cover charge, and then early dinner time (5:30-6:30) has ½ price too. The rest of restaurants are free of charges. Check map first to be familiar with the location of the reservation desk. Be sure to check itinerary so that you don’t book a restaurant for a time slot when you are still off the ship.
Stuff you shouldn’t forget
- Large water bottles to carry water, NCL charges fee for bottled water on board, but they do offer water for free in buffet restaurant where you can fill your bottle without spending a penny. Also soft drinks (coke etc) are not free, so bring your own if you want to save some dollars.
- Medicine for your medication, check the information desk if you have common problems such as cold or headache as they have things like Tylenol for free.
- Sunscreen, deodorant etc. Otherwise, you will suffer some serious sun burn.
- Snorkeling gears (include a life jacket if you are note a big swimmer) if you plan to take a snorkeling trip, the price to rent the gears on ship is about the same when you purchase a new one in store.
- Photography things: such as water-proof camera. If you do have DSLR, bring both telescope lens and wide lens.
If you use DSLR and wants to changes lens on the road, make sure you bring a CMOS cleaner because the chance of dirt went into your camera body is much higher when you are near the ocean.
- A portable printer is nice to print post card to mail to home from a location.
Beach bag, it is handy to have it and put things in an organized way.
- Personal spare time killer: Mp3 player/video game console/books, there are lots of things to do while onboard so you won’t easily get board unless you are interested in nothing. The ship gym is very nice; easily spend some quality personal time over there with your favorite music.
December 10th, 2006
There are so many flight tracking sites, you prob don’t know which one to use, this article will show you the three best.
FlightStats.com uses flash based user interface, gives pretty complete details and a google map to show actual location of the plane when it is within North America.
Flightaware.com uses a lot of AJAX to make pretty slick user interface. It gives amazing details of flight info from FAA, such as actual/esimated flight speed, altitude, remaining distance etc. It is pretty similar to what you normally see on those international flights. Another neat touch is it kept statistics about airport, they have some nice charts!
Flightarrivals.com is the barebone flight info site, plain and simple, (it looks like a J2EE based app, you can even see .do in its page url) it lists flight based on airport, or airline within a few hour range, if you just want the basics, this is prob what you need.
August 11th, 2006
Four daily flights to JFK starting service from July, also Charlotte was painted blue. This is good news to folks who will travel to new york a lot, the price is $69 for 21 advance purchase. Considering all seats will have free satellite TV to enjoy during the flight, that is not bad, the plane is the bigger 100 seats Embraer 190s, definitely better than the 40 seats commuter ERJ plane that I am used to. If I am going to take personal trip, JetBlue is a no-brainer to go to NYC.
JFK is JetBlue’s hometown and has daily multiple service to the west coast, now SouthWest has a serious competitor to challenge its 39% passenger volume growth in the first two month of year 2006. This will also endanger the commuter jet service to NYC that is offered by AA, Delta or US Airshuttle.
JetBlue will fill the empty terminal A gates left by Indepency airline since its bankrupcy in late 2005.
April 14th, 2006
Spent sometime since yesterday on helping my parents to get some good deal on international travel, since this is personal travel, we have to find ways to reduce the cost without sacrificing the convenience. To summarize what I have learned and hope this can help you reduce the time spent on future travel planning.
For domestic travel, use web airline search engine. Don’t waste time calling your favorite travel agent. To start, ITA search engine is a feature-packed and easy to use web service. It gives you the rock bottom ticket price with reasonable alternatives displayed in a GUI chart. Use ITA help you making the decision on when/which airline has the right flight with the price you would like to pay. You cannot book directly on ITA site, but you can go directly to the airline booking website, for example, www.nwa.com, using the flight info you got from ITA to book the ticket. Be careful, some airline will first display the ticket price without tax to grab your attention, this might be lower than ITA price quote you find earlier, but after the tax added, the airline price should be the same.
An alternative to go directly to the airline website is to go throught one of the three major online aggregator: Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz. You should expect to see the same price returned from ITA. The actual result might vary a little (less than $5) among the three. The benefits of going ITA first is that you have much powerful comparison shopping tools available from ITA.
Another cool website that I found useful is travelocity dream map, yahoo it gives you an visual map to tell you the lowest fare possible to all destination in the world within the next month or so. This assumes you are flexible on the schedule, for personal trips, who cares it starts on Mon or Wed? A similar purposed web site is air-fare.com. The link for these two services are all started from RDU in favor of my local buddies, change it for your own need. This can quickly tell you which cities are relative cheaper for you to travel…
For international travel, it is a totally different beast. This time, you should call your travel agent. Unlike domestic air fare, all international air fare is moderated by the government of each country. This means airline cannot arbitrarily reduce the ticket price to win the competition, so don’t expect to see some good price from airline directly. What happens is airline usually sold volume of international air ticket to travel agencies at discount price, the travel agency adds some thin mark-up and resell the ticket to us, here the price is still cheaper than the price you can get from aa.com (unless it is a promotion which runs for a very short while).
But just before you call the travel agent, use ITA and Dream map to help you get a rough idea on how much is expected. Once you get the rough idea, you can call the travel agent. Now that you are prepared, you can tell the travel agent what you want and how much you would like to pay. This way, there is a much bigger chance that you will land a good deal..
April 5th, 2006
Check which seat is considered a good seat, using http://www.seatguru.com/
it allows you search the aircraft seat layout by airline name/plane type, it in particular highlights those “be-aware” seats that has certain restriction or annoyance (such as small legroom or big engine noise etc)
November 25th, 2005
Our last day of the stay is so full: by the time we arrive at the gate for our 5:50pm flight, we barely had any time to eat our take-out dinner.
Our first stop of the day is old town Scottsdale. It really shows the West of westerns. Scottsdale is a town in greater Phoenix region. The old town district has all the buildings decorated with old western style, it really reminded me of all these western movies. You can expect to see all kinds of stores from souvenir shops to restaurant (there is one store having Italian ice cream– Gelato, Chuck might be allured).
The highlight of the day is Pow Wow where we enjoyed watching natives dancing. Pow Wow is an annual community event for Indians to see friends, this year’s Pow Wow is hosted by Arizona State University on Veteran’s day (11/12). Natives from all parts of Arizona gathered to dance in their traditional costume; it is a perfect opportunity to photograph the lifestyle and social activities of Indians. During the event, you can see how they hold memorial to the people passed away in the past year and how they celebrate the newborn babies. We even saw Lilo duplicates - Hawaii dance performers. The even is a whole day event, we had to leave at around 4pm because we have to catch the flight.
The feeling seeing home sweet home after four hours of flight is still the best one can have! (Thanks to Irene to pick us from the airport).
November 13th, 2005
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